Posted Fri Feb 02 17:33:42 EAT 2018

DEAR SON: I hope I never know the pain of seeing you hurt

In my brief fatherhood experience, I have come to learn that an injury inflicted to your child by a non-relative, even one which you could have caused yourself, makes you mad. It makes you think your child was being targeted. ILLUSTRATION| IGAH

By PETER MOGAMBI

In Summary

In my brief fatherhood experience, I have come to learn that an injury inflicted to your child by a non-relative, even one which you could have caused yourself, makes you mad.

It makes you think your child was being targeted. You start lamenting and hating.

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Dear Jijee,

Those images that a parent shared on Facebook some hours before I sat down to write this have not left my mind yet.

The back of my mind can still see that punctured ear. He said the ear was hurt by his daughter’s teacher at school. He wanted his Facebook friends to advise him on what to do, and the discussion soon veered into how he would give the involved teacher a piece of his mind without making the young girl, who is barely four years old, thinking she now has power over the teacher. I shudder to imagine what happened to that hapless, ear-pinching teacher.

In my brief fatherhood experience, I have come to learn that an injury inflicted to your child by a non-relative, even one which you could have caused yourself, makes you mad. It makes you think your child was being targeted. You start lamenting and hating.

See, Jijee, I was once a teacher. And I injured a couple of children as I punished them (it’s illegal yes; but some kids just need canes) and sometimes it caused trouble.

I ONCE CANED A SPOILT BRAT

There was a time a parent came asking why I had to cane his daughter so much that she was left with a swollen hand. She was in Standard Five and had all the highlights of a spoilt brat.

Curiously, she was one among many who received lashes that day but it is only her parents who took offence. It could have turned messy, if not for my experienced supervisor who managed to cool things down.

And of course I had to be reminded that I had no kid at the moment and as such, I did not know the “pain” of raising a child and hence I should have been the last person to lift a finger against anyone’s child.

That incident in mind, I have been debating within myself on what I would have done if it was you who came home from school with a fresh wound, to report that it was Teacher X who inflicted it. Would I head to the institution determined to knock the daylights out of Teacher X?